What Money Can Buy: Examining the effects of prepaid monetary incentives on survey response rates among college students

This study examined the effects of prepaid monetary incentives on college students' rate of responding to a survey designed to assess beliefs and values. It also assessed the extent to which incentive effectiveness depended on such student characteristics as gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that $2 incentives enhance response rates over $0, but that $5 incentives do not substantially improve response rates over $2 incentives. Further, although the descriptive findings suggested that the effectiveness of incentives varied across different groups of students, multivariate analyses identified no such differences.